Sound Sunday has been our outlet for sharing legal free music downloads once a week since April 2010.

Over the years, we have gathered a few loyal fans and we appreciate your support. Over the past year, I have shifted the format in hopes it would attract more readers. I focused on popular music genres, compiled music collections for specific needs, and added a playlist for each edition. Apart from the occasional spike in traffic and the extremely rare evergreen post, I failed to consistently hit a nerve and build a larger following.

Thus it is with a heavy heart that I have decided to retire Sound Sunday. For those of you who came here for the music downloads, I will use this last post to share the tools I have used to compile Sound Sunday.

Finding Free Music

When I started this column in 2010, I had doubts whether I would be able to find a sufficient number of legal music downloads to fill a post each and every week. I started with 5 single MP3 downloads. When I did the first album post at the end of May 2010, I thought I’d never find enough material for a second edition. I was so wrong. Today, my archives are chock-full with album bookmarks that I will never share.

The reason Bandcamp has developed into such an important resource is because most artists who offer free music downloads can be found here. Even when I saw an album on NoiseTrade, I’d usually find the artist on Bandcamp as well. Apart from being a great resource for discovering music, Bandcamp offers great streaming widgets and makes it easy to support artists with a donation.

Navigating Bandcamp

The best way to discover specific music, is to browse Bandcamp by tags. In the beginnings, when I tried to share a mix of genres, I occasionally used that to round off an edition. More recently, this has been my primary way of compiling albums around a topic or genre.

Once you go to a tag page, you’ll find a long list of albums, which you can sort by popularity or newness. For Sound Sunday, I would look at the first page for both sorting options, drag out free albums, which I would then review and process further. Albums that met my overall quality criteria, but didn’t quite fit, would go into my bookmarks.

Compiling Playlists

The idea of compiling a Sound Sunday playlist had been around for a very long time. Time and time again I went out to find a service that would allow me to do that online. I finally discovered Minilogs.

Minilogs allows you to add streaming audio from a number of sources, including YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp, to compile a streaming playlist. It didn’t immediately work with Bandcamp, but the developers were very helpful in getting it up and running. You can find all Sound Sunday playlists here.

What makes Minilogs so incredibly useful, is its browser extension. Once it’s installed, navigate to a page that contains the streaming audio clip you’d like to add to your playlist, click the extension, create a new log (playlist) or save the link to an existing one.

After you made the log public, you can share it, which includes code to embed the playlist on other pages.

That’s It For Sound Sunday

Now you know how Sound Sunday came together each and every week. Thank you for your support over the past years. We will continue to cover music and I hope we’ll see you around to enjoy it. If you have any requests for what kind of content you would like to see, please fill the comments with suggestions and feedback.

What made you come to Sound Sunday and what kind of music compilations would you appreciate in the future?

What! So this is the last? So sad to see it go! I always try to pass by here and share the page, it's one of my favorites in MUO. I want to say thank you for all the music recommendations, Tina. I still listen to some of the bands you've featured here that caught my ear. I will never have listened to them without Sound Sunday. Thank you.

Wow! I can't believe it. It's been a great run, Tina, and I'm sad to see Sound Sunday go. I read every article from the debut until now, usually through RSS. You've been an excellent curator of interesting free music. My library is populated with many of your recommendations. I appreciate you telling us how you found your selections, but I will miss yours. All the best!

Thanks for the kind words, Keith. If you've kept up with Sound Sunday for that long, you should have a huge music library; it should sustain you for a while. :) And once you start looking for music on your own, you'll find that the amount of quality free material is truly astonishing.

I have mixed feelings about losing Sound Sunday. On the one hand, I think it helps to have someone curate what's new (or may seem new) in music, something I don't usually have time for. On the other hand, most of what was curated here tended to be music I was less interested in - ambient, hip-hop, etc. Likely I was not your hoped-for audience, but even this old lady enjoyed learning about and hearing samples of what younger music enthusiasts were excited about. Thanks for your effort and thanks for sharing. I learned and found the instruction entertaining.

Tina has been writing about consumer technology for over a decade. She holds a Doctorate in Natural Sciences, a Diplom from Germany, and an MSc from Sweden. Her analytical background has helped her excel as a technology journalist at MakeUseOf, where she's heading the Windows and Productivity sections.